Posted by
Steve Smith on
Aug 30, 2013; 8:59pm
URL: http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/PRISM-tp7583742p7583752.html
Marcus -
I feel you nailed it well this time (again). There are definitely a
handful of perverse psyches on this list (a handful who speak up anyway,
probably a much larger number sitting back, perversely listening to our
banter and nodding (up/down, side/side)). I don't know if that is
enough, but it is nice to know that Perversity may have benefits beyond
it's own intrinsic satisfactions.
While I'm not sure that our gov't is categorically impoverished/lazy, it
is certainly *larded with* impoverished and lazy strata/elements. Big
corporations (such as Google) end up there too... Google being a
creature of "Internet Time" may be, like the Replicants of Blade Runner
be following the same (burning bright but fast) curve of senescence.
All the pre-internet giants hit that wall hard (IBM, DEC, Xerox, Kodak,
Microsoft, ... ) no reason to believe that Google and Amazon aren't
already hitting a similar wall? To the extent that the founders are
still relatively young and in the saddle, it may take another decade...
but it seems nearly inevitable?
Maybe it is about "Big" (absolute scale, being many orders of magnitude
beyond personal scale? or relative scale, being an intellectual/economic
superpower?). Or maybe it is about the life cycle of the beast?
>
[hidden email] wrote at 08/30/2013 12:36 PM:
>> The one in the subject line? They don't have a choice in that. Just
>> like encrypted mail services would have to misrepresent their
>> services to
>> customers, because they'd be required to have intercepts available
>> within
>> their systems. So, DuckDuckGo can claim not to track, until they get a
>> subpoena and a gag order telling them that they do.
>
> Well, it's not merely (or perhaps even mainly) about PRISM. It's more
> about the systemic evil that is an unavoidable consequence of
> economies of scale ... or even "success".
>
> Google does evil because they're too big. The symptom is that they're
> a target for impoverished/lazy organizations like our government.
> They do evil because they homogenize and regularize things (despite
> the overly _entitled_ amongst us us moaning about how they're not
> homogenous and banal enough). They're evil in the same way Walmart or
> Harbor Freight is evil. Make it all the same, dirt cheap (or free),
> disposable. Corner the market. All in exchange for the identities and
> personalities of your customers.
>
> What's really being bought and sold, here, is individuality and
> personality. Perversity is becoming our most valuable asset. I'll use
> DDG until/if everyone else begins using it. Then I'll find some other
> (dysfunctional) search tool to use. 8^)
>
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